Muhammad Executed After Spending Nearly Four Decades On Death Row

RAIFORD -- A man convicted of killing a North Central Florida corrections officer more than three decades ago was executed on Tuesday at the same prison where he committed the murder.

Askari Abdullah Muhammad, 62, was executed by lethal injection Tuesday at the Florida State Prison near Starke.

Muhammad was initially sentenced to death for the 1974 abduction and killing of a couple from Miami. But it was after Muhammad was already in prison for those murders that he took the life of his third victim: corrections officer Richard Burke of Middleburg.

Burke, 48, had been working at the Florida State Prison for only four months when Muhammed stabbed him to death with a sharpened spoon back in 1980.

"I'm glad it's over, and it is over for me," said Burke's daughter Carolyn, who witnessed Muhammad's execution. "I can just move on, because it has been a long struggle, and I miss my dad a lot," she said.

After declining to issue a final statement, Muhammad was pronounced dead at 6:45 p.m.